2013: the year of mobile payments?

With Christmas now safely tucked away behind us, everyone connected with mobile commerce is pouring over how well or not mobile retailing did. While High Street stores didn’t do very as well as would be hoped, online commerce had a very good yuletide. And mobile made great strides within this.

Some 20% of online sales came through mobile channels this year as consumers demonstrated just how much they like the ease and convenience of doing it. But mobile’s influence didn’t just amount to cannibalising high street sales, in many cases it actually drove a large proportion of those sales, with more consumers than ever using mobile to research products, respond to ads, use vouchers and generally start their shopping sprees on mobile.

This is all good news for the mobile sector, which I think can now finally say that 2012 was the year of mobile. We have talked for many years about when the year of mobile will arrive (since about 1992 in my case), but now it has.

But it hasn’t panned out quite how many thought. A lot of the mobile sales that did happen – both of hard and fast goods and digital ones – happened on tablets, most commonly the iPad.

The tablet, it seems, is shaping up to actually be a rather good way of shopping, creating what is being hailed variously as ‘couch commerce’ or t-commerce.

But what does this mean for telemedia and in particular the payments side of things?

Well, tablets offer that excellent mix of being able to use apps and websites and so there is slowly emerging a split in payments. Apps are getting all manner of cool in-app billing tools – not least Payforit4 – and so there are many opportunities there for the sector.

The m-website side of things, however, still offers something of a conundrum. Most websites still rely on card payments or PayPal and so it is anyone’s guess as to whether micro-payment technologies can muscle in on this. That’s something for us all to work on in 2013.

In the digital content ecosystem, direct operator billing is coming to the fore and we are going to see a lot more of this over the coming months. As this week’s top story shows, O2 has signed a deal with MACH to make this even more prevalent and the launch of O2’s Charge to Mobile platform is a welcome step forward for consumers at least who are increasingly buying digital content.

This is going to be one of the key areas of development through the year as more services are rolled out that can exploit this sort of technology to deliver great and simple ways to buy things on phones.

And who knows we may yet see this sort of thing start to make some headway in turning mobile into a ubiquitous payment mechanism for anything. 2012 may well have been the year of mobile, but I am now waiting for the year of mobile payments to really hit the mainstream.